Bertolucci balances the epic with the personal
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"The Last Emperor" (1987) was Bernardo Bertolucci´s most shameless and successful grab for Oscar gold, a sweeping epic with a cast of thousands and perfectly polished production values that netted the filmmaker wins for direction and screenwriting and a bounty of statuettes for his collaborators. The film had the good fortune to compete in one of the weakest fields in Oscar history; it doesn´t take twenty years of hindsight to wonder if 1987 was so grim a year in American film that "Broadcast News," "Fatal Attraction," "Hope and Glory," and "Moonstruck" were really among the best in show. I would have voted for "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," but I guess that was a long shot to make the Academy short list.
Bertolucci´s Oscar romp was more than a charity case, however. Though terribly tasteful and utterly impeccable, "The Last Emperor" still manages to be a sensitive and occasionally moving study of a character and a country in transition.
Pu Yi isn´t a likely candidate for a sympathetic character study. As a child, he is named the next emperor of China, the Lord of Ten Thousand Years. He presides over a lavish court in the Forbidden City in Beijing where is attended by thousands of servants and wields a limitless budget that assures him that he is allowed to do anything that he wants. Except leave the Forbidden City, that is. When Pu Yi´s little brother visits court, the young emperor learns for the first time that while he may be master of his domain, he doesn´t hold water anywhere else in the city or anywhere else in the country. China is rapidly transitioning into a Republic and is eager to leave behind its imperial trappings in order to join the world community. Pu Yi is lord of all, and nothing.
The film leaps back and forth in time cutting between a "coming of age" story and a present-time in which Pu Yi finds himself wearing a number and a drab gray uniform as he is forced into a Chinese reeducation program. Once so high and mighty that no other mortals were considered worthy enough to look at him, he´s now just another citizen and prisoner expected to clean the toilets like everyone else. Several actors play young Pu Yi at various stages of life; John Lone plays the adult Emperor both in the flashbacks and in the reeducation camp.
Pu Yi finds two mentors in the film. In his salad days, he learns from a dapper English gentleman named R.J. Johnston (Peter O´Toole) who schools him on civilized manners. Here, the young master develops a taste for all things Western, a penchant that would serve as a black mark on his name in the new China. In camp, citizen Pu Yi learns from the prison governor (Ruocheng Ying) who helps him come to terms with his "crimes" against the state and assists in his integration into a very new world.
Bertolucci strikes an ambivalent attitude towards his subject. Though the film sympathizes with the helpless Pu Yi, it doesn´t sugarcoat his life. He is a spoiled brat accustomed to privilege and actively seeks the help of anyone who will help him maintain his absurdly high standard of living, including the Japanese who make him a puppet ruler after invading Manchuria. The Emperor has clearly outlived his usefulness, and you will find little nostalgia for "the good old days." Western viewers may also be surprised by the even-handed manner in which the reeducation camp is portrayed. Life is brutal there, but Pu Yi isn´t simply the victim of a brainwashing program. He truly discovers a new identity under the stern but sympathetic governor.
The film is lavish beyond all reason, as befits an Emperor whose lifestyle was also lavish beyond all reason. It´s impossible to pinpoint a single film that represents the high water mark cinematographer Vittorio Storaro´s career ("Apocalypse Now," "Reds," as well as numerous other Bertolucci productions: "The Conformist" and "Last Tango in Paris" among them), but "The Last Emperor" is as breathtaking as anything he has filmed. Yet the film´s real accomplishment is its ability to simultaneously be an epic and an intimate portrait. Whether watching the entire court of the Forbidden City at work or looking closely at the sad, resigned face of Pu Yi as the world passes him by, we are drawn in to every frame of this gorgeous film.
The production was quite a coup in its own right. "The Last Emperor" was a big budget Western-financed blockbuster filmed on location in Beijing, an unprecedented accomplishment at the time and largely unmatched since. As David Thomson points out in his essay included in the insert booklet, the film also served as a way for many Westerners to get their first-ever glimpse not only of the Forbidden City but also of everyday China, albeit a China of the past. Such a "tourist" films runs the risk of peddling in cheap exoticism, but Bertolucci avoids this trap by focusing his attention on one man who, though born to a fate unlike anyone else, still readily serves as a point of identification for the viewer. The film´s enigmatic ending (which I won´t spoil here) is either a brilliant grace note or a mistaken indulgence, but it certainly lingers in the mind long after the end credits have rolled.
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